On March 17 Microsoft released the 8th Cumulative Update for Exchange Server 2013, 98 days after the release of CU7 which is nicely in line with the quarterly release cadence of Cumulative Updates. This Cumulative Update is called CU8, not a word about Service Pack 2, so SP1 still continues to be the officially supported Service Pack.

There are some new features in CU8 that are worth noticing.

With CU8 there are improvements for mobile clients in a Hybrid Configuration. When a Mailbox is moved the Outlook client will automatically detect and reconfigure accordingly. This was not the case with Mobile clients. This behavior has changed in CU8. When a mobile client connects the local Exchange server and the Mailbox is moved to Exchange Online an additional check for the TargetOWAUrl on the Organization Relationship object is performed. This will return an HTTP/451 redirect to the mobile client which in turn will be redirected to this new URL. This feature will be available to all EAS compatible devices that can handle the HTTP/451 redirect option. Unfortunately this feature is only available for onboarding customers (i.e. to Office 365) and not for offboarding (from Office 365) customers.

There an improved migration for Public Folders migration, now supporting batch migrations. This is faster (supports multiple jobs), more reliable and provides an easier migration management.

CU8 supports viewing calendar and contact types of modern Public Folders in OWA

Kemp recently released a free version of their virtual LoadMaster (VLM) load balancer solution. It is just like a regular VLM with some restrictions of course. There’s no High Availability support in the free LoadMaster, there’s only web-based support and you cannot update the firmware to a newer version for example. Also the bandwidth is limited to 20Mbit (L7) throughput with 50 transactions (TPS) 2K SSL keys.

However, it does support the nice features such as Global Server load balancing, the Application Firewall Pack and the Edge Security Pack. This makes it a perfect solution for small organizations, for lab environment or for regular test environments. It is possible though to upgrade the free LoadMaster to a regular device, making it also a perfect solution for a Proof-of-Concept. When finished the POC you an easily bring the LoadMaster to production by upgrading the license.

At this moment (up to Exchange 2013 CU7) there’s no other workaround that to remove the Edge Transport server from the domain, install the Edge Transport server role (make sure you got the FQDN of the server correct!) and after installing rejoin the Active Directory domain. This works fine.

I noticed however that upgrading an Exchange 2013 CU6 Edge Transport server that’s domain joined to CU7 doesn’t hit this issue, there was no need to remove it from the domain before upgrading.

When creating user accounts and Mailboxes in Office 365 the default Microsoft password policy is applied, which means you have to change your password every 90 days.

While it is a best practice to change your password on a regular basis not every customer is too happy with this. I can think of one exception and that’s a service account, this makes sense to have the password set to never expire.

To change this option for user accounts in Office 365 you have to use the Windows Azure Active Directory PowerShell module to connect to Office 365 using the following commands:

My Exchange 2013 (CU7) servers are logging warning approx. every hour regarding the free available disk space on the Mailbox database volumes in the

Application and Services | Microsoft | Exchange | Managed Availability | Monitoring crimson channel in the eventlog. The threshold for this is set to 175GB, and especially for lab environment this can be too low.